The board will always want to head upwind when you rake the sail back and your weight is back. As you pick up speed and begin to move to the back of the board, inserting your forward foot in the forward footstrap you must bear off the wind keeping pressure on the forward foot strap until you pick up more speed to maintain your course, otherwise you will stall (lose speed), the tail will start to sink and the board will begin rounding up into the wind . . . splash!

It should come as no surprise that you go upwind because youre STEERING upwind. You board has three steering wheels, and when getting in the straps for the first few times, youre turning all three steering wheels upwind. Turn them all downwind or across the wind and guess where youll go.

1. One steering wheel is your sheeting angle. Sheeting in = steering downwind. Youre VERY likely to be sheeting out, which is steering you upwind. Sheet in until your sail foot is very near your rear foot while planing.

Another steering wheel is your board roll angle. You likely have most of your weight on your feet, your feet are on the upwind side of the board, this depresses the upwind rail, which steers a shortboard (by definition, any board with no daggerboard)upwind. Use your feet and ankles to roll the board so its rails are even right-to-left (a roll angle of zero in airplane terms) or even until the downwind rail is slightly depressed. Weighting the booms (via your harness, not your front hand; the latter is WORK) merely lessens the upwind rail pressure; you actually want to ADD pressure to the downwind rail, not merely SUBTRACT pressure from the unwind rail. Put much of your weight into the harness AND use ankle muscle to roll the board level or slightly downwind-rail-down. That turns THAT steering wheel downwind.

3. Just as when slogging or longboard sailing, tilting the sail back so its center of effort (COE) gets behind the boards center oflateral resistance (CLR)steers the board unwind (but you knew that from all the windsurfing books youve read, right?) So how can one rake the sail (the COE) back and still steer offwind? Because as a board pops onto a plane, its CLR also moves back, so the COE can still remain over the CLR. Sheeting in aids this effect because it helps drive the COE forward, keeping if forward of the CLR.

Now ya got all three steering wheels turning you downwind, and AWAY YA GO.

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